Nintendo Has a Soul

There are companies you use and companies you believe in. Nintendo has always been the latter for me—closer to a religion than a product line, with all the irrational loyalty that implies.

What their games had, and what most games don’t bother to develop, is an actual soul. I spent whole nights hopping through the Mushroom Kingdom as Mario, the whole mythology of it—Princess Toadstool, the Koopa castle, the same loop played with complete sincerity—just lodged in my chest like something that had actually happened. Link wandering Hyrule, the weight of the Triforce, Ganon at the end of it all: I cared about that world in a way that still feels disproportionate and entirely correct. Fox McCloud and his crew felt like real companions on something that mattered. And then there was Ark—the strange, quiet pilgrim at the center of Terranigma, circling the globe to rebalance something broken between light and dark, eventually meeting himself in the Antarctic snow. I was a kid when I played that and it wrecked me in the best possible way.

The GameCube was a commercial disappointment nobody really recovered from. But 2006 brings the Revolution—the new console, the one with the motion controller nobody quite knows how to categorize yet—and it feels genuinely different. No official screenshots, no confirmed launch titles, just the silhouette of something new. There’s something interesting in that ambiguity. I want to believe. I’ve always wanted to believe.